By moving to the Microsoft Azure cloud, the company has gained a solution that can flexibly respond to its rapid growth and the associated increasing infrastructure requirements, while saving costs.
MEDUSA GROUP was founded in 2003 with the opening of Medusa restaurant in the historical centre of Bratislava. Today it is a leader on the Slovak gastronomic market. Thanks to its unique concept, the company has experienced a rapid growth of its operations, which has caused a form of discomfort in IT management. Different platforms, different product versions, distributed solutions with varying levels of HW obsolescence, as well as hard-to-predict future demands on the HW background triggered the need to search for a suitable platform and a solution to the problem.
The priority goal of the project was to find a way to deal with any growth of the company without the need for investment commitment, i.e. to deploy a solution that would be able to respond in a truly flexible way to the company's expansion plans. At the same time, it was important to ensure the unification of the existing platform and to set a communication standard. All this while ensuring high availability of the restaurant system and the SAP ERP system.
When looking for a suitable solution, a classical solution with a built-in server room was first considered, coupled with the purchase of new hardware. The existing hardware equipment was outdated and was no longer sufficient in capacity or performance for the extensive consolidation and centralization of IT services in the company. Due to the planned growth of the company, a larger scale investment was required to cater for the increased demands for IT services anticipated in the short term future.
After a financial analysis of such a solution, the customer finally chose an innovative way of implementation by building IT infrastructure in the Microsoft Azure cloud. One of the main reasons for this decision was the extensive flexibility offered by this solution.
Unification of the existing platform with online access of the operations
High infrastructure flexibility according to current needs
Reduction of infrastructure costs
Making staff work more efficiently
The connection to the customer's WAN network was made by a VPN connection to the network in Microsoft Azure, which made it possible to comply with the customer's security requirement, which required access to selected IT services only through the local network. The upgraded solution enabled the centralization of the SAP ERP system and the restaurant system with online access from individual locations. This replaced the original solution, which required laborious manual data collection and processing at the company's headquarters.
At the same time, the customer combined building an IT infrastructure in the Microsoft Azure cloud with migrating the legacy email system to Office 365. Choosing the Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan accelerated user efficiency as the original IMAP approach to email was replaced with Exchange Online and other services such as Skype for Business and SharePoint Online were added. The implemented Information Access Management Service (Azure RMS) enabled a high level of protection for data hosted in the cloud, eliminating concerns about off-premises location of corporate data.
The chosen method of implementation allows for the gradual expansion of IT facilities at the pace required by the company's processes. Microsoft Azure is thus also the ideal platform for its further expansion. The integration of the solution into the existing IT environment without the need for initial investments in hardware eliminated the costs of acquisition and subsequent management. In addition, the customer only pays for what they actually use.
The high availability of the Blue Gastro restaurant system and the SAP ERP system was another requirement that was fulfilled. Thanks to the 99.9 % guarantee of availability of Microsoft Azure services, these key IS are always available to all employees.
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In Microsoft Azure, we have found a solution that not only streamlines the work of our employees, but also saves on infrastructure costs and can flexibly adapt to our growing requirements.
Róber Vysoký
MEDUSA GROUP
IT Manager
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Member of the Board of Directors, CTO and Director of CES Division
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Operations Director, CES Division
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